I have several hd's on my Windows 7 system and E:\ is the drive in question. I right-clicked on the hard drive, which is an external btw, went to permissions, and selected everyone and then click Deny and apply. How can this be undone? It no longer even shows me the name of the drive it just says "Local Disk"! Now when I go to properties and security everything is unavailable because I'm part of the Everyone that I Denied no matter if I'm my regular user or administrator account. Please help! Thanks.

John thank you for your response. I cannot see who the owner is because it says I don't have permissions to view the owner while logged on as administrator. And yes, regretfuly I admit that I did get that message and I was clicking too fast and selected yes. I know as far as recovering the data I could boot it into Linux and get to the data fine I'm just rying to figure how to not have to copy all th einfo off format and then copy it all back on. Interesting thing however, I can access partifular folder names on the drive. As I mentioned when I double click it from computer I get access denied hwoever, I am allow to navigate to a directory below the root o fthe drive (e.g. E:\Documents) and I can access them just fine using either Administrator or plain user account.

So did you Deny the entity called "EVERYONE" or specific accounts and groups? You should have received a dialog box stating: "You have denied "EVERYONE" group access to "E:\". No one will be able to access "E:\" and only the owner will be able to change the permissions. DO YOU WANT TO CONTINUE?" You need to find the OWNER account that formatted the external drive. Normally you wouldn't deny access to an entire drive...you should really only do specific folders...especially if you don't know who the root owner account is on the drive. You could try checking who the owner is by Right Clicking on the drive, going to Properties -> Security - Click on ADVANCED - Click on the OWNER tab. It should show what the owner account is...and that account is the only one that can change the drive permissions. It could be the actual "Administrator" account... You would have to login as that "Administrator" account to change the permissions. Hopefully you didn't have anything important on that drive...the last resort is if you didn't have the Administrator account password or a way to get it...then you can always blow away the drive definition in disk manager, and recreate it...and reformat it...but then you lose all the data on there. r/ johnJohn Wildes | Senior Enterprise Architect | United Airlines | Desktop Engineering

It should show what the owner account is...and that account is the only one that can change the drive permissions. As an admin, he should be able to take ownership of E:\, right? Then he can fix the permissions as necessary. Just tested my theory using two admin accounts and a dummy folder, with Full Control permission denied to the EVERYONE group. It worked.

Apparently not just as any account in administrators group. You'd have to be the "Administrator" account since that is the owner of the account. By default Windows doesn't let you login as the "Administrator" but instead creates you an account that is an administrator by group membership. By default the "owner" of all folders is the Administrator account. If he's an administrator on the box but he has not been explicitly denied access to a folder then he could take ownership of the folder. This appears to be a very specific case where EVERYONE includes all accounts except the "owner" of the object in question. John Wildes | Senior Enterprise Architect | United Airlines | Desktop Engineering

SO what you're saying is that YOUR user account has deny access to the ROOT level of the drive, but not to the folders underneath it? That would be appropriate since you didn't apply the rights to the folders underneath...have you attempted to login as the Administrator and change the rights of Everyone from Full Control DENY to Full Control ALLOW? John Wildes | Senior Enterprise Architect | United Airlines | Desktop Engineering

Apparently not just as any account in administrators group. You'd have to be the "Administrator" account since that is the owner of the account. ... If he's an administrator on the box but he has not been explicitly denied access to a folder then he could take ownership of the folder. Hmm, as far as I've seen, any admin account can take ownership of a folder and then reset its permissions, despite any explicit Deny permissions. If that sounds dubious, try it and then let me know... Here's a more detailed description of the test I mentioned in my previous post. It was performed in a virtual machine with Windows 7 freshly installed. Using Computer Management, I created two accounts called tester1 and tester2. I then added these accounts to the Administrators group. Using the tester1 account, I created a folder called C:\test. The owner, by default, was tester1. Using the tester1 account, I explicitly set deny Full Control permissions for the tester2 account, as well as the EVERYONE group. (I did this using the Advanced dialogs, and double-checked that there were explicit denies for the Take Ownership permission.) Using the tester2 account, I took ownership of the C:\test folder without any problem . This was despite my initial inability to view the folder's permissions and owner because "You do not have permission to view this object's security properties." Using the tester2 account, I reset the folder permissions to normal.

Apparently not just as any account in administrators group. You'd have to be the "Administrator" account since that is the owner of the account. ... If he's an administrator on the box but he has not been explicitly denied access to a folder then he could take ownership of the folder. Hmm, as far as I've seen, any admin account can take ownership of a folder and then reset its permissions, despite any explicit Deny permissions. If that sounds dubious, try it and then let me know... Here's a more detailed description of the test I mentioned in my previous post. It was performed in a virtual machine with Windows 7 freshly installed. Using Computer Management, I created two accounts called tester1 and tester2. I then added these accounts to the Administrators group. Using the tester1 account, I created a folder called C:\test. The owner, by default, was tester1. Using the tester1 account, I explicitly set deny Full Control permissions on C:\test for the tester2 account, as well as the EVERYONE group. (I did this using the Advanced dialogs, and double-checked that there were explicit denies for the Take Ownership permission.) Using the tester2 account, I took ownership of the C:\test folder without any problem. This was despite my initial inability to view the folder's permissions and owner because "You do not have permission to view this object's security properties." Using the tester2 account, I reset the folder permissions to normal.